The Orlando Consort and Guillaume de Machaut

NOTE: All of the music on this program is features the Orlando Consort and our guest Don Greig. The recordings are on the Hyperion label. For more information: 

 

From AllMusic.com :Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most influential composers of the 14th century, and his secular love songs were as significant as his sacred masterpiece, the Messe de Nostre Dame. The Orlando Consort began its survey of Machaut's music with the 2013 album, Songs from Le Voir Dit, which was followed by The Dart of Love in 2015, and A Burning Heartin 2016, thus making Sovereign Beauty, their 2017 release on Hyperion, the fourth installment in this impressive series. This CD is a collection of Machaut's settings of his own chivalric poems about idealized beauty, in the forms of the unaccompanied virelai and the contrapuntal motet, ballade, and rondeau, which were influential in the development of the Ars nova in the court music of France and Burgundy. Machaut's interlocking part writing is smoothly rendered by countertenor Matthew Venner, tenors Mark Dobell and Angus Smith, and baritone Donald Greig, who have mastered the rhythmic complexities and harmonic tensions between the lines to convey the proper lyrical expression with practiced ease and proper intonation. Hyperion's recording in the church of St. John the Baptist, Loughton, Essex captures the singers with clarity and a feeling of closeness, though the acoustics lend some spatial depth to the group.

 

Miraculously, the poems and music of Guillaume de Machaut (c1300-1377) have come down to us in what is probably a complete state, no doubt owing to the care with which their creator had his works put to parchment in precious illuminated manuscripts. Their beauty may have ensured that they survived the disastrous events which ravaged France during the later fourteenth century. No fewer than six of these manuscripts contain both his poetical and his musical compositions, a few more only his poetical works. Machaut also left us a literary portrait of himself: in several of his narrative works he acts as an observer and commentator on the comportment of noble lovers, and in two stories he even steps to the fore himself as the lover-protagonist. Moreover, at the end of his life he added a prologue to his works in which he formulated his artistic creed. Thus, we have a fairly clear picture of Machaut as an author, whether or not this would have had any resemblance to his real-life person, of whom but scarce documentation remains.

During the first half of his long life Machaut was patronized by the house of Luxembourg, first climbing up to the function of secretary at the court of count John the Blind, who also was king of Bohemia; later he served John’s daughter Bonne. She was married to the future king of France, John the Good, but died in 1349 of the plague. For both father and daughter Machaut expressed a life-long veneration. The patronage was continued by Bonne’s son-in-law Charles of Navarre, and later her sons Philip of Burgundy, John of Berry and Charles of Normandy, who was to become king Charles V. In the meantime Machaut had also acquired canonries in Reims and Saint-Quentin, well-paid sinecures which allowed him to devote his time to the composition of his literary and musical works. During his later years in Reims he arranged the precise order of his works and had them copied in sumptuous books, on command of his various protectors. His artistic achievements earned him a reputation in the fourteenth century as France’s most famous poet and composer. He died in 1377 at a respectable age, having astonishingly survived the dangers of war and plague.

Machaut’s works evoke a refined and elegant courtly society, almost a dream-vision within the cruel fourteenth-century reality of pestilence, war and civil strife; only scattered remarks in his narrative works and the lamentations of his late motets betray his awareness of France’s tribulations. With few exceptions—especially these last motets and his Mass—his works are dedicated to the vagaries and difficulties but also the joys of courtly love. The compositions recorded here belong for the most part to his earlier works, in which Machaut experimented with the genres he had inherited from tradition, such as the lay and motet, and with the various chanson types—virelai, ballade, and rondeau—of which he codified the forms for a long time to come. Within the restrictions of these ‘fixed forms’ he strove to endue each individual work with something ‘foreign and novel’ as he repeatedly expressed it, since that was found ‘most pleasing by the listeners’. Not only the meaning but also the concrete sound of words and rhymes play an important role in his compositions. He was fond of double meanings and wordplays: words that sound identical but have different, even opposed meanings. In his musical style a wealth of little, standardized motifs alternating with sudden leaps are strung together in daring counterpoint to form a colourful mosaic.

The three main song forms were all originally destined for dancing. Only the virelai preserved that character; Machaut preferred to call it a ‘chanson baladee’. It opens and closes with a refrain; possibly we should suppose group performance for the many refrain lines and solo performance for the new verses. Most virelais are monophonic. Their declamation is often fairly syllabic, enlivened by short melismas. The virelai seems to have been much in favour at Bonne of Luxembourg’s court. Four of them can be heard in the present recording. Comment qu’a moy lonteinne (Virelai 5) is based on a thirteenth-century woman’s song, Belle Doette, in which a lady laments the absence of her lover, who has just died in a joust, and promises to remain faithful to his memory. Machaut recasts the song for a man’s voice, as he swears faith to an absent beloved; the melody is clearly inspired by the festoons of the older song. Tres bonne et belle (Virelai 23) is Machaut’s only three-voice work in this genre. Its polyphony is, however, much simpler than that of the ballades and rondeaus. Stricken by his lady’s beauty the lover pledges to serve her, even in spite of her absence and the pesterings of those eternal enemies of lovers, gossipers. Foy porter (Virelai 22), again a testimony of the lover’s loyalty, is remarkable for its short lines of text and the accordingly brief melodic lines, sung in an energetic duple measure. Dame, a qui (Virelai 12) also has short lines, but here they alternate with longer ones; it makes the short ones sound as sobs. In this song the lover complains that he finds no sign of goodwill, let alone of any promise, in his beloved lady, although he does not abandon all hope.

Both ballade and rondeau soon lost their dance character in the fourteenth century and developed into stately songs with complex polyphony. Simplest in form is the ballade which has only one refrain line at the end of each of its three stanzas, mostly a memorable expression that may be a quotation. The declamation of the text is usually fairly slow, with many melismas. De desconfort(Ballade 8) is sung by an agonizing lover, who sums up his sufferings while nevertheless remaining willing to die, as the refrain tells, ‘En desirant vostre douce mercy’ (‘Desiring sweet mercy from you’). The two-voice work has a very melismatic and impassioned melody, its mode seeking the limits of the contemporary gamut. A much lighter atmosphere reigns in Dame, ne regardés pas (Ballade 9), in which the lover is caught by the lady’s pleasant look (‘Par vostre dous plaisant regart’). The song is characterized by a stubborn dotted rhythm. The experimental four-voice Se quanque Amours (Ballade 21) features a colourful contrapuntal palette, and within the text a rare, almost suspect, jubilant message that nothing can surpass the good and the joy that the lover possesses, ‘Contre le bien et la joie que j’ay’ (‘Compared to the benefits and joy I possess’).

The rondeau, characterized by a compact text with many repeats, was the most intimate type of song. The only rondeau recorded here, the two-voice Quant j’ay l’espart (Rondeau 5), has playful short verses, like many a virelai, but in the music long-drawn melismas with gently sloping lines prevail, expressing the quiet well-being the lover feels.

The lay was known as the most arduous musico-literary genre. A typical lay is monophonic and has twelve double stanzas, eleven of which each have a different metre, rhyme-scheme and melody, the twelfth stanza repeating those of the first. It is a challenge for the poet to find such a variety of metres and rhyme sounds. The attribution of the lay recorded here, Un lay de consolation ‘Pour ce que plus proprement’ (Lay 23), is contested: it is only found in a manuscript written long after Machaut’s death. The poetic form and content are not untypical for Machaut; the musical structure, however, is unique. In this work, in contrast to all other lays, the second stanza of each pair has a new melody. It has been discovered that the two melodies make perfect counterpoint with each other and thus should not be sung in succession but simultaneously. Thus, exceptionally, this is a lay with two different voices. Machaut wrote two three-voice lays but these are both in canon form. The text of the lay divides in two parts: the first six stanzas are a testimony of a lover’s fidelity, but in the second part jealousy and gossip estrange him from his lady; the transition is characterized in the music by a change of metre. At the very end the voice of the lady (or perhaps of the God of love) answers the lover’s complaint, consoling him and promising him joy after his travails.

Like the virelais, Machaut’s motets belong for the most part to his earliest compositions; only the last three can be related to events from around 1358–1360. The other twenty were certainly composed before c1350, but probably much earlier. A typical motet features three different voices and texts in a hierarchic structure. The subject is enclosed in the lowest voice, the tenor, which customarily is a melisma borrowed from liturgical chant; its words usually convey a strong emotion. The melody is rhythmicized in very large note values, forming repeating patterns, called the taleae, and has thus the slowest movement. On this basic layer, a faster moving voice is composed, with a fairly brief poetic text, the motetus; the third voice, called triplum, sounds highest, moves fastest and declaims the longest text. The challenge of a motet was—and is—to find out how the three texts and melodies cooperate in the presentation of, and reflection on, a moral problem.

The two motets presented here are closely related, first of all since in both tenors the same biblical person speaks, namely David: as the Psalmist in De Bon Espoir / Puis que la douce / Speravi (Motet 4), and as the king in J’ay tant / Lasse! Je sui / Ego moriar pro te (Motet 7). Their complex musical construction is also very similar, although the tenor melodies are very different. The tenor word of motet 4, ‘Speravi’, gave Machaut the opportunity to use it in a double sense. In the original Psalm text (Psalm 12) it expresses David’s lasting trust in the Lord’s mercy, although his enemies seem to prevail against him; on its own, however, the Latin verb can also imply ‘I hoped (but do no longer)’. That is the sense which is elaborated in the upper voices, in which allegorical figures help or oppose the lover in his courtly pursuit. At first he was supported by Good Hope but Desire attacks him so strongly that he loses hope. Paradoxically, only by despairing and by complete subjection to the dual wills of his lady and Love can he eventually regain hope for mercy. The obsessive tenor melody consists of only four notes which are constantly interchanging; this motif is taken over in the middle voice, and ultimately also appears in the upper voice, so that eventually it pervades the entire contrapuntal structure, probably as an expression of the lover’s obsession with the struggle between Hope and Desire.

In motet 7, the three texts conjure up three different but related stories. The tenor words evoke a tragic biblical tale, and the slowly and gradually falling chant melody was famous as an utterance of grief: king David wishes to give his life for his beautiful son Absalom who has risen up against him and been killed by David’s general Joab. Like in motet 4, the Latin words have a double meaning: in their original context they express David’s love and despair (‘Might I die for you’), but in isolation they can also be read with a more ominous meaning: ‘I shall die for you’. This is what they betoken in the texts of the upper voices. In the motetus a female voice retells the Greek myth of the beautiful Narcissus who despised the love of the nymph Echo. She died from grief, but he as well fell prey to a fatal passion: that for his own reflection in the water of a fountain, since then known as the mirror of Narcissus. In vain reaching out for this illusory beloved he died from unfulfillable longing. The lady compares her own fate to this tragic myth and her story is more amply explained in the triplum. There, full of remorse, she complains how she foolishly despised the love of her true friend, preferring another. This second lover, however, has proved false and has deceived her. The lady can’t regain the love of her erstwhile lover since he, for his part, has found someone else. Thus, his fate, being rejected, now has become hers, as by the effect of a mirror. Her desire for her lover makes her transgress all decency: she openly confesses her burning love—as a courtly lady under no condition should—but to no avail; she will die from longing, like Narcissus.

Whether he turned to the simplicity of the danced virelai or the increasingly complex polyphony of ballade and rondeau, whether he dealt with the poetic challenges of the lay or the intricacies of the learned motet, Machaut’s inventiveness made him endow each of his works with a singular and unique character. In his life-long musings over the problems of love, expressed in superb poetry and music, he achieved an impressive oeuvre of an astonishing variety. Thanks to his carefulness in preserving his works, we can, even after 700 years, enjoy Machaut’s creations afresh.

II. Machaut: Fortune’s Child-- Hyperion CD CDA 68195.